MARY PAGE MARLOWE

About the show

The contemporary American playwright and actor Tracy Letts portrays the eventful life of a woman, his protagonist Mary Page Marlowe, in his new, epic play: from infancy and toddlerhood, through her youth in the 1950s and 60s, from starting a family and achieving professional fulfillment, through missed and successful first and second chances, from crisis and new beginnings, to the autumn of her life, now approaching seventy. From moments of hope, turning points, and fragments of his main character's memories, Letts weaves a delicate, moving biographical tapestry that celebrates human life in its poetic fragility, changeability, and everyday nature. Letts's moving play offers a delicate, defiant alternative to contemporary societal norms of what constitutes a successful or unsuccessful life, success or failure, fulfillment or defeat: Every life, every human being's, is both tragic and extraordinary, if one only looks or listens closely enough—in all its fragility, fragmentation, and unfulfillment. As Mary Page Marlowe says in the laundry about an old, textile blanket: "It's brittle. But it's still whole."